Roughly three weeks ago, a plethora of the music industry’s elite took to a press conference to announce the re-launch of the music streaming APP - Tidal. The likes of Rihanna, Kanye, Jay - Z , Madonna and even Taylor Swift, stood before the world’s media and boasted that the service would offer fans (note the use of the word fans and not customers) high - quality audio and video as well as curated content.
The service also promised the media that artists would have more control over their content, selling this “exclusive access” bullshit whilst charging the ‘fans’ $20 a month ($24 in AUD) for the privilege. It was to herald; in the words of the PR spin masters “a whole new era” in the music industry.
Well… It didn’t. Numbers released by BGR - a US mobile and technology news website on April 21st, show the APP has fallen out of the top 700 iPhone download charts after only 2 weeks. The crash so glorious it has been dubbed “a spectacular flop”.
So what the fuck happened? If we take a look back we can see cracks forming early on. For instance, shortly after the music service went public and all looked hunky dory the CEO Andy Chen was let go. The following reason was given by a Tidal rep; Tonstad (the new guy and formerly a consultant for the Norwegian Ministry of Environment WTF???) has a better understanding of the industry and a clear vision for how the company is looking to change the status quo,“ Whatever that means.
But even before they “parted ways” with boss man, and gave this irritatingly ambiguous statement, something very unfortunate happened to the brand. Its marketing strategy turned around and bit it in the arse! And spectacularly too. I’m just speculating now but this may have also led to Chen’s departure?
According to BGR Tidal’s attack on its competitors Pandora and Spotify apparently raised the public awareness of their streaming services boosting their download performance, in particular Spotify’s who rocketed up the iPad download chart to number 40, something not seen since November 2014. This all curiously happened after the media launch of Tidal on 31st March 2015. Ooops.
Since then Tidal has dwindled. When they originally launched they were positioned number 20 on the download charts, and in just two short weeks, they were forced out of contention and fell out of the top 700.
Poor Tidal, it looks like they had it against them from the beginning, what with trying to compete against popular apps in an already highly competitive market backfiring and all. I’m no expert, but that sounds like an obvious marketing 101 rule to me.
Anyway, now it’s up to the new CEO to reposition the brand so people don’t associate it with over protective multimillionaires who appear to be using the APP to promote their own agendas. And whilst they’re working on that, maybe they should also reconsider their business strategy, you know, get customers for themselves, rather than getting them for their competitors. Just a thought.
-Bise
